The Official Movie Thread

[CiG]

everything i mentioned was from rym aside from bergman/marketa i think, i quickly browsed the rym list when making that post. i wish you’d asked me a few weeks ago ‘cause i could’ve probably listed a lot more specific titles lol

Oh okay, just when you said "I've been through the whole list not long ago and discarded probably half of them" it made it seem like you were mostly referring to something else. I haven't even seen too many folk horrors myself so I can't speak on a lot of what you mentioned. Reminded me I need to watch Blair Witch again though, I haven't seen it since it dropped.

When you said "somewhat debatable" did you mean that it is or isn't folk horror?

 

[no country for old wainds]

i don’t think it is personally, it falls more under the ‘supernatural horror’ definition on rym (as well as found footage horror obviously), there isn’t much of a religious or communal element. i actually really like the genre definition for folk horror on RYM fwiw

i do absolutely love blair witch, whatever genre it is. scared me more than any other movie growing up.

 

[CiG]

I'm not trying to be a bad ass but I don't think I've ever been scared of a movie. One time my cousins rented Scream and I walked into the living room at the worst moment, when the killer crashes through glass or some shit, and jumped and ran back to my room lmfao. But it had no lasting impact on me, and I tried rewatching that recently and thought it pretty much sucked.

I think I just got told way too many fucked up stories as a kid by my uncles, aunties, cousins etc at a young age and it immunised me.

Speaking of Blair Witch though, it would be pretty handy to have a list of found footage horror actually worth seeing. The genre is a dumpster fire but I know there are gems to be found, I just can't be fucked to do the finding.

 

[challenge_everything]

Speaking of Blair Witch though, it would be pretty handy to have a list of found footage horror actually worth seeing. The genre is a dumpster fire but I know there are gems to be found, I just can't be fucked to do the finding.

You can kill two birds (folk + found footage) by watching The Medium (thai flick from 2021). I think I posted about it here a while back and likened it to The Wailing.

 

[CiG]

Yeah that's on my watchlist. Honestly I'm pretty good with anything newer, I autistically keep up with shit lmao. It's the older stuff I'd love some direction with, and by "older" I mean like pre-2015.

 

[no country for old wainds]

yeah i’m interested in that one as well!

i guess it depends what you mean by ‘scared’, when i was a kid a horror might get me creeped out by dark shadows for a while or have me not wanting to go near windows in case something’s watching me and shit like that lol. the ones that had a lasting impact were probably more disturbing than ‘scary’ though. i think blair witch is some of both.

 

[CiG]

I meant both of those kinds of impacts. Honestly Jaws fucked me up for a long ass time, I used to love the beach but that movie started my sea paranoia lmfao. I completely forgot about that.

 

[no country for old wainds]

that had an effect on me too actually, pretty sure it’s the first time i ever saw a kid die onscreen. i believe the original version actually shows the shark straight up biting into his body but they cut it ‘cause it was too brutal

 

[Bloopy]

I don't remember any long-lasting impacts, but the first horror I saw was Gremlins at about age 9 - may've had a couple of nightmares after that one. There was also some scary bits in The Brave Little Toaster when I was 4 (the junkyard scene and the monster truck-driving villain stuck with me, but not the evil clown somehow), and the Goonies which I saw sometime in between (the booby traps and Sloth). Oh yeah, and maybe Jurassic Park at age 9 too - even if I found the dinosaurs more fascinating than scary, the electric fence scene kinda freaked me out too.

I wouldn't say I found any scary as an adult. More just unsettling (Cujo and the original The Hills Have Eyes on 1st viewing) or harrowing/tense as fuck (The Wages of Fear). Then there's Martyrs which was more just persistently grotesque to the point it's difficult to keep watching.

 

[no country for old wainds]

i watched jurassic park dozens of times as a kid, it’s probably my most viewed movie of all time. i never found it that disturbing but i think the part that came closest was probably samuel l jackson’s arm haha. there’s this horrible sanitised version they always show on tv here which excluded that scene, as well as the one of the lawyer in the toilet among others, so fucking lame.

gremlins i loved at that age as well but i guess it was too cartoonish to disturb me.

most of the disturbing moments of my childhood came from books really, i read a lot of horror back then. i remember reading about a guy finding a cold pale corpse in a dumpster when i was like 7 or so.

 

[CiG]

I know a few people who got fucked up watching Arachnophobia and Cujo too early, and my ex got mindfucked by The Grudge. She'd always stare up at the dark corners of the wall/ceiling lmfao.

I dunno, supernatural stuff never did much to me. I grew up watching shit like Commando and Cobra with people getting shot to shit and chopped up with blades so horror mostly came across like a novelty to me. But "natural horror" like Jaws and Dark Age freaked me out. Jurassic Park just put me in awe.

 

[no country for old wainds]

you may be a special case (well we knew this already ) but i also think each generation is more desensitised to horror compared to the one before, nasty stuff is so much more accessible these days as well as more prominent/normalised in media culture. blair witch or the ring or something may be the closest my generation had to one of those collective visceral responses that people had to stuff like halloween, the exorcist or nightmare on elm street back in the day, but i don’t think even those had nearly the same level of ‘lasting impact’.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

We may be more desensitized on average but it's definitely an individual thing, some people still have that kind of visceral response. There's a girl in my film club who's seen a good deal of movies and she just cannot stomach horror at all. She was visibly/audibly wincing during Lighthouse last year, panicked at the sight of snakes in Prisoners last weekend and punctuated one of the more distressing reveals in that film by loudly dropping her thermos on the floor. On one hand I envy those kind of strong emotional responses, but she really didn't enjoy those films and I guess I wouldn't either if they actually inflicted fear in me. Everyone I know who loves horror is more or less immune to the scares, ironically.

I haven't had a fearful response to a film since I was very young. On the other hand, video games scared the shit out of me well into my teens and maybe even still, idk how I'd react to a proper horror game today.

 

[no country for old wainds]

P.T. was probably scarier than any movie i’ve ever seen.

 

[Einherjar86]

you may be a special case (well we knew this already ) but i also think each generation is more desensitised to horror compared to the one before, nasty stuff is so much more accessible these days as well as more prominent/normalised in media culture. blair witch or the ring or something may be the closest my generation had to one of those collective visceral responses that people had to stuff like halloween, the exorcist or nightmare on elm street back in the day, but i don’t think even those had nearly the same level of ‘lasting impact’.

The accessibility and ubiquity of disturbing media, itself an outgrowth of the post-1945 hyperspeed of techno-culture, is redrawing the borders of genre. A few years ago, Kim Stanley Robinson described the modern world as a giant science fiction novel that we are all writing together; counterintuitively, if a writer wants to write realism today, they should write science fiction (Robinson's claim). I think something similar can be said for horror, especially when we live in a world of increasing eco-catastrophes and panic over global risk.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for the way that history produces new markers for defining genres. Found footage only makes sense after handheld cameras are affordable and become widely used. Folk horror makes more sense in the wake of conservative backlash against counterculture and religious skepticism from the early-/mid-twentieth century. So it's probably true that the years to come will give rise to some new conventions of horror that continue to affect at least some viewers.

But overall I think you're right that genre tropes are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with so-called reality.

 

[Krow]

I was a wee lad when I first saw The Thing bite that guys arm off when he tried to defibrillate it. Pretty sure I nearly died. After that. Eh. I was a 12 yr old kid with a computer in his room. Nothing in a movie will ever match a real life execution or car crash mutilations and tbh I regret watching a lot of that shit. Fucking morbid curiosity.

Found footage I liked... The Sacrament and that bat shit insane segment similar to it from whatever VHS film that is (VHS series in general).... The Taking of Deborah Logan... I also like Lake Mungo but I know a lot of people dont because its mega slow burner. I get a laugh out of WNUF Halloween Special too but I know that's shit and could see why a lot of people would hate it. The Medium is cool too if I'm thinking of the right film. The baby's demise absolutely offended my wife which is always nice to see.

Poughkeepsie Tapes is alright if you look past how fake some of the reporting and "experts" are.

I do not like Creep. Dont get the love for that one at all.

 

[no country for old wainds]

the thing was another formative experience for me. and yeah i too spent a lil time on ogrish back in the day. also had my obsession with air crashes which are also more disturbing than most things.

the problem with found footage, especially during the wave of blair witch knockoffs, is that it was very easy for a mediocre or low effort filmmaker to make something in that genre and make money out of it. its inherent cheapness is perfectly designed for the lazy to exploit and it also often hides a lack of imagination behind the veneer of rEaLiSm. i don't think anyone could accuse blair witch of being unimaginative or not thinking about its images and what to shoot or not shoot.

murder death koreatown was an interesting spin on that recently, in part because it was built (very exploitatively with no permission whatsoever) around a real life murder. but even that one kind of falls apart when it starts leaning more heavily on the same old tropes.

 

[CiG]

The kind of horror that tends to have impact are scenarios that could happen to me. So other than "natural horror" shit about weirdos living in people's ceilings, home invasions, natural disasters etc can sometimes fuck with me.

you may be a special case (well we knew this already )

Found footage I liked... The Sacrament and that bat shit insane segment similar to it from whatever VHS film that is (VHS series in general).... The Taking of Deborah Logan... I also like Lake Mungo but I know a lot of people dont because its mega slow burner. I get a laugh out of WNUF Halloween Special too but I know that's shit and could see why a lot of people would hate it. The Medium is cool too if I'm thinking of the right film. The baby's demise absolutely offended my wife which is always nice to see.

Poughkeepsie Tapes is alright if you look past how fake some of the reporting and "experts" are.

I do not like Creep. Dont get the love for that one at all.

I was actually going to ask if anybody liked Creep because it's on Netflix and I might check it out. The Sacrament is one I also want to see, it's more or less inspired by Jim Jones right?

Lake Mungo slays.

 

[Bloopy]

Happy 1000th page, Movie Thread!

 

[challenge_everything]

Should of course mention Man Bites Dog as the seminal example of found footage / mockumentary even though it's not horror.

Along similar lines I really like I Blame Society, an ultra black comedy about a struggling filmmaker who starts making a video diary about her attempt to turn herself into a murderer. A legit no-budget film made mostly on GoPro and camera phones.